“My attitude is that it always feels better when you’re No.1,” Williams opined. “There’s nothing like when they announce you and they say, ‘The No. 1 player in the world.’ So for me it definitely gives me a little bit more confidence, I think a little bit more pep in your step. It’s just a great feeling. This keeps me going — I’m No. 1, I’m pretty good at it still. If I’m doing something well, I don’t want to stop, and I shouldn’t stop. I don’t have to play another match, but I’m having fun, I’m enjoying it. Normally the history books wouldn’t really matter to me but when you get closer to a goal, you can’t help but start thinking, ‘Okay, I want to do history.’ In retrospect I have made history already, so I just try to keep it going a little bit at a time. I don’t know if I could ever top Margaret Court’s record, but it would be exciting to try and reach some of my fellow countrywomen who are ahead of me.”

Radwanska had a determined start in defending her title from last year.

“It was a really special tournament for me because I was really playing a lot of good matches against top players and not even losing a set,” Radwanska said. “I definitely have great memories from here. And the final was a very good match. Hopefully I can play the same level of tennis this year.”

“It’s not that I wasn’t playing great, I was just asleep out there — I definitely needed to wake up and start playing,” Stephens said after getting fed a bagel by Olga Govortsova. “I thought I played some good points even in the first set when I was not there. It was a lot of battling and just hanging in there, and I think after I won a game in the beginning of the second set I was much better and thought, ‘I’m just going to go ahead and play.’”

On the men’s side it was still all-unseeded scrub play, with Jarkko Nieminen coming from a set down to defeat David Nalbandian, and other notable winners Ivan Dodig, David Goffin, Viktor Troicki, and Bernard Tomic.